Foucault on Power and Authority in the Church (I)

Posted January 9, 2018 10:34 pm by Dr. Adam DeVille

Ever since reading MacIntyre’s After Virtue more than twenty years ago, I have been fascinated with the distinction between power and authority, a distinction which, he says, emotivism obliterates. That fascination led me in part to study the questions of papal power and authority in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy and in several other places.It was, then, with great interest that I received recently in the mail Steven Ogden’s new book, The Church, Authority, and Foucault: Imagining the Church as an Open Space of Freedom (Routledge, 2017), 190pp.The author is an Anglican cleric in Australia, and much of this book is